Free Living Dead by J.W. Schnarr

the floor like a couple blue hobos.
    She stalks down the hall to her bedroom, where Scott is now, all the time, and throws the door open. He’s lying on the bed staring up at the ceiling and he doesn’t look over when she enters the room.
    “We’ve got to do something about your idiot friends,” she says. Like they’re children, and Scott and Bretta are the parents. When the children are good, they belong to Bretta. When they’re bad, they belong to Scott. Huffing paint in the basement, that’s definitely Scott behaviour. Having awkward boners, that’s all Scott.
    Scott says nothing. His breath comes and goes in calm, shallow waves. His bloodshot eyes are circled with exhaustion. Even though all he seems to do anymore is sleep.
    Bretta says Scott’s name, and then again. When he doesn’t say anything the second time, she screams it. Outside, the dead trip over themselves to get to the window. It’s the closest point of contact between them and the voice in the house.
    “What?” he asks, the tone in his voice letting her know she’s getting on his nerves.
    “Your friends are huffing paint like a couple bums.” Her words are an accusation. Their behavior is somehow his fault.
    Scott shakes his head. He blinks slowly. He looks back up at the ceiling. His voice is faint and he asks if she can stop because his back hurts. “I feel like I’m settling,” he whispers. He says lividity , but Bretta doesn’t know what that word means and it sinks to the floor.
    Instead, she comes to the end of the bed. “I don’t think you’re paying attention. The house stinks like paint, and they can both die from doing it. If they die,” she says, “they can come back.”
    Scott shakes his head. Bretta puts her hand on his leg, just below the knee, and can feel sweat through the sheet he has sprawled across his legs and midsection. Scott kicks away from her, and the move catches her by surprise. Her thumb is caught on his shin and her wrist bends painfully.
    He comes alive, scrambling to get away from her, into the corner of the room. His heels dig into the mattress, and he pushes it away from the walls, out of the corner, and then he falls into the hole he makes. The force of the bed moving knocks Bretta down. The side of the bed catches her across the calves.
    “Get the fuck away from me!” he screams. “Stop touching me!”
    “Jesus, Scott!” she says, collecting herself from the bed. “Stop!” She’s holding her wrist, and she holds it up so she can watch the tendons in her arm move. “You hurt me.”
    “Just go,” Scott says, ignoring her. Dead people are pounding on the wood covering the window, and one of the boards spits a nail and comes loose. For a moment, they’re both looking at a woman’s hand, rotten and stinking; scraped and sporting a perfect French manicure that seems weirdly out of place in the filth.
    “You can’t touch me,” Scott says. “Not ever.”
    There’s a sharp smell in the bed, and Bretta catches a whiff of it just before the smell of the woman outside comes across the room at her. It’s warm sweat and urine, and now she can see the stain under the sheet. Scott wasn’t just wet from sweating when she touched him.
    “How long has this been happening?” she says, pulling the sheet back from the bed. Scott stares at the wet stain, about the size of a large pizza but more square than round.
    He doesn’t take his eyes off it. “I’m bleeding out,” he says. Beside him, the woman scratches at the wall and breaks one of her perfect nails. She leaves four long scratches in the paint and one short one.
    “It’s piss.” Bretta starts to touch it, and then she says it again. “It’s piss. It’s not blood.”
    Scott has been pissing the bed and not bothering to tell anyone. He hasn’t been bothering to get up, either. Just lying there like a corpse, and pissing as the need arises.
    Scott shakes his head. “Nobody listens to me. It’s blood.” He’s got his hands on his